Batman: The Animated Series is one of the true all-time classics in DC’s vast catalog, and it continues to shine with every passing year. Between its timeless and stunning animated style and its compelling stories and larger-than-life characters, it’s easy to see why the show has set the bar upon which all other shows are compared. Now Upper Deck has created a new trading card set around the iconic series, and Upper Deck Vice President of Product Development Grant Sandground has broken down the set’s coolest cards and rarest chases, including the incredibly rare Kevin Conroy autograph card. If that’s not cool enough, you can watch us unbox a full box of the Batman: The Animated Series cards for yourself in the video below.
When Upper Deck and DC Comics announced their new partnership, the team knew early on that Batman: The Animated Series was going to factor into its early plans. “Right from the get-go, when we started mapping out how we wanted to handle the DC Comics IP, Batman: The Animated Series was being discussed right away because we knew this was such a powerful, nostalgic, beloved area,” Sandground said. “You know, obviously the show ran from 1992 to 1995, so there’s, I think something like 85 episodes in all. So there’s a lot of characters, there’s a lot of storytelling, there’s a lot to it. It’s a pretty robust area for us to then do what we do with building trading card products. You need a variety of characters, you need a variety of storylines, you need a good amount of imagery, which we can get in this instance through screenshots, and fortunately, you know, the Animated Series gives us a lot to work with in that regard.”
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The Batman: The Animated Series Set Arrives At The Perfect Time
The set also comes at the perfect time, as not only is Batman: The Animated Series more beloved than ever, but trading cards as a market have skyrocketed in the past year or two, with fans collecting more than ever.
“People are just collecting cards more now, and that also extends into sports cards and entertainment cards. Like what we’re doing with Batman: The Animated Series. Entertainment cards are red hot, and when we approached Batman: The Animated Series, knowing today’s market, we wanted to make sure that the hardcore fan of the show would want to collect this set,” Sandground said. “We wanted to make this a set that you could really collect, a set that you could spend hours putting into a binder. That kind of old school kind of thing, like breaking it down and collecting the set. If you love the show, you’re going to want to do that.”
“So when we went around like, what kind of product do we want to build for Batman: The Animated Series, we wanted to make it a product that was affordable for most folks. We basically kind of took the framework of what we would call our flagship brand, which, if you think about a lot of what we do with trading card production, is based in the world of the NHL. We’ve had an NHL license since 1990 consecutively, so that’s 36 years of NHL trading cards, and we have a flagship product that is sort of the core product that casual fans, alongside hardcore fans, all enjoy as this giant community. And you can buy that product at Target, or you can buy it at specialty hobby shops, and so we wanted to build something with some of the structure of the flagship into Batman: The Animated Series,” Sandground said.
“When you buy a box of Batman: The Animated Series, you’re going to get 12 packs in a box. Each pack contains 6 cards. You get 72 cards in a box. Each 6-card pack has 3 base cards, and when I say base set cards, I mean the cards 1 through 90 that I just talked about here. So if you’re buying a box, you’re going to get 36 base set cards out of the 90-card set, which doesn’t sound like very much, but that was very deliberate because the intent is for people to buy 2, maybe 3 boxes, and then you can like work on your set. We didn’t want people to just buy 1box, build their base set, and kind of be done with it. That’s not today’s market. We wanted to provide different levels of challenges for different types of sets to build within this product, and the most common thing is the 90-card set, but even that, you’ve got to like trade around. You may only want to buy 1 box, and you can easily kind of pick up singles or trade with other collectors,” Sandground said.
The Rookie Cards of Batman: The Animated Series
In addition to the base cards, the set will feature special UD Debut cards, which are essentially Batman Rookie cards. “We also did the Debut cards as cards 91 through 120 in the checklist, so really, for collectors, if you want the entire set, you need the 90 common storyline cards plus the 30 Debut cards. The Debut cards are character-based. They’re sort of like faux rookie cards for that world of the Animated series,” Sandground said. “You know, obviously in trading cards, rookie cards are a big thing, and even in entertainment cards, it’s fun to layer in the concept of a rookie card that you can get a Batman: The Animated Series rookie card in your box, or you can get a Joker or Harley Quinn or a Riddler, you name it.”
“There are 30 key characters that we did that for, and those cards are slightly more short printed, and I think Debuts, you get about 3 Debut cards per box. So one in every four packs you’ll hit a Debut card. There are 30 different Debut cards, so as you can see, that’s going to take about 10 boxes to get all of them. So that’s more challenging than the 90 card base set, but that’s very deliberately structured to kind of up the ante as you get further down the rabbit hole of what this product has to offer, and you buy a box, you enjoy it, maybe you go back to your shop a week later, get another box, get a little more into it, start looking online like on ebay or something to buy some of your singles for the Debuts, etc,” Sandground said.
“They are character-based, and we know that a very popular way for card collectors to collect is maybe they don’t want to collect full sets of everything. Maybe they say, you know what, I’m a Batman guy, I want to collect all the Batman cards, and I want to do his Debut rookie card, but I want to do all the different, various parallel versions of that Debut to create, quote unquote, a rainbow of that card. Very, very popular way of collecting,” Sandground said. “We’ve seen it in sports for decades, but it’s very much the same in entertainment with comic book-based trading cards. People will collect their favorite characters. They may be Poison Ivy fans, or they may be Catwoman fans, or you name it. There are going to be people out there who are going to want to get as many different Catwoman cards as I can for Batman: The Animated Series. Great. Go do that. That’s awesome, and we built that with it in mind.”
Parallels, Outburst, and Even Rarer Cards Are In The Mix
While Debut cards are harder to come by, there are even rarer parallels you can find, and that’s just the start of your collecting journey with this set. “Those Debut cards, however, have scarcer versions of them,” Sandground said. “For example, there’s a blue border version, and these blue cards, you get 1 blue Debut per box versus, like the 3 regular Debut cards per box, and you get 1 blue base set card per box. The regular cards have the gray borders on them, so we change the border colors, and then they get scarcer.”
“You can have purple-bordered cards, and these cards, once you get into the purple level, these cards are serial numbered on the back. So the purples are numbered to 299. Then we have orange-bordered numbers of 1 of 99, and those also exist for the Debuts. For the Catwoman, there are only 99 copies of that card in existence, and then one of the scarcest ones is the gold border. Those are limited to 25, so they get pretty tough, and as you might imagine, if you want to do a rainbow Batman Debut, once you start getting down to the gold of 25, really 25 in the world, there’s going to be a lot of collectors vying for that card to create their rainbow,” Sandground said.
“Beyond that, we also leaned into some really, really cool technology. We call these cards Outburst, and you can see, all of a sudden the foiling, it goes into this dazzling, absolutely stunning effect. Beautiful. You get 1 of these per box, 1 Debut per box, and the Outburst cards are only done for the 30 Debut cards, the cards 91 through 120. We did not do as many parallels for the storyline cards as we did for the character cards,” Sandground said.
“That’s because we know people will collect the character cards in rainbow format. These are again 1 per box, so like you want the Mr. Freeze, it’s 1 in every 30 boxes, but look how pretty it is. There’s also extremely rare versions of these Outbursts where the silver area you see is tinted red, and it’s limited to 25 serial numbered copies,” Sandground said. “And the biggest chase is the Gold Outburst, limited to a 1 of 1. So there’s literally a 1 of 1 gold Outburst Batman, a 1 of 1 gold Outburst Harley Quinn, you name it. Those are going to be some of the more aspirational Chase cards that could generate literally thousands of dollars of value in the secondary market.”
Not to be done there. We also added a holofoil treatment, and these holofoils are even scarcer than the Outburst. They’re not serial numbered, they’re ratioed, but I believe you only get about 3 of these holographs per 12-box case. So these are about one in every 4 boxes, and again, only the 30 Debuts have the Holofoil treatment,” Sandground said. “So there’s only 30 of these different holofoils, gorgeous. There’s also an even scarcer holofoil, a gold holofoil. You’ll notice the border is gold versus the more common silver. These are incredibly rare. 1 in every 1440 packs. That’s 1 in every 10 sealed cases of product. Find 1 of these gold outbursts, and there are 30 different ones, so literally just a handful of copies of each of the Gold Outbursts have been produced.”
“We also did clear-cut cards, and these parallels are really famous in our flagship hockey. The Outburst, the clear Cut, the gold outburst 1 of 1s, very, very famous cards. Last year, Macklin Celebrini, there’s a $250,000 bounty that just got posted for his outburst 1 of 1 gold, quarter of a million dollars. How crazy is that? So when I say this has some bones, structural bones of the flagship brand, it’s cards like these. The acetate debuts, the outburst debuts. These acetate debuts, these are I believe, 1 per case. 1 every 12 boxes for these ones, so they’re pretty rare, but you could, you should be able to find them on the secondary market,” Sandground said.
“We also did the playing cards. We kind of did a full deck of playing cards, and we did all the way up to a full 52-card functional deck. They look like playing cards, and this is a fully functional deck. The jokers are short printed, but you can see a red Joker, a black Joker. The aces and the face cards are short printed as well, so they’re a little tougher, but you do get playing cards. You get 1 playing card per pack, so you can definitely work and build on them. Then we did scarcer gold-tinted versions of the playing cards. I think there are 2 or 3 per case. We also did really nice stickers. These are 1 per box; they’re prismatic stickers. Really, really nice looking ones,” Sandground said.
Batman’s Autographs Will Be Highly Sought After, Especially the Rare Kevin Conroy Autograph
There are a number of amazing autographs in the set as well, featuring a variety of people from the series, and this is one of the many additions Upper Deck made when compared to the lone Batman: The Animated Series set release previously during the show’s airing.
“If you’re lucky, you’ll hit an autograph. There are a couple of autographs in every 12-box case, so they’re tough pulls, but it’s interesting to note that for this IP, for this Batman Animated series, this is not the first ever trading card product made for the television show. Topps did a series 1 and a series 2 product all the way back in 1993 while the show was actually airing, and great products, but they were applicable for that time,” Sandground said.
“Very simple, like just a 90-card base set and 10 inserts that were like 1 in 6 packs or something like that. So not a lot of rarity and collectibility. Where today’s consumer wants the autograph cards, they want sketch cards, they want numbered cards and technology cards. Never before for Batman: The Animated Series have there been autograph cards, but we did manage to come to terms with eight of the actors, the voice actors, so you get stuff like John Glover as the Riddler and Paul Williams as the Penguin,” Sandground said.
“Look at the technology on that card, isn’t that a beautiful card? It’s called Cold Snap Autographs. Pretty tough pull, but there are some really, really pretty autograph cards in this product. We also did sketch cards, hand-drawn sketch cards in this product as well. They’re about 1 per case, not guaranteed, but most hobby cases should get 1 of them. Additionally, we did printing plate cards, which are the actual plates used by the print vendor to print the cards. We did the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black plates, so there are all sorts of crazy chase cards to go find in this product,” Sandground said.
“Let’s talk about Kevin Conroy for a second. If you’re a fan of this show, you’re probably a pretty big fan of Kevin Conroy because Kevin Conroy is widely regarded as the most popular voice of Batman, and that’s amongst like Val Kilmer, George Clooney, and Christian Bale. Kevin Conroy’s Batman: The Animated Series, his work is so important, it’s so iconic that there’s no way we wanted to leave him out of this product,” Sandground said. “So we worked with DC and Warner Bros. to see if they would allow us to procure some cut signatures of Conroy, who passed in 2022 from cancer, unfortunately.”
“Prior to his passing, he did an array of signings at conventions and collector shows. In fact, he worked with a company called Celebworx, and we actually managed to contact them directly, and they had inventory of his signings that they deliberately had him sign some more stuff above and beyond what collectors wanted at the show. They had that available that they stored away, so we managed to contact them directly and buy some directly from Celebworx. So you literally can’t get better provenance for a Kevin Conroy cut signature than directly from the company that did his signings at his shows back in 2020, 2018, and 2016. And so we managed to get a handful of those cut signatures,” Sandground said.
“Now, the signatures he signed are pretty big. They’re larger than a standard-sized trading card, so we built oversized trading cards to embed those cut signatures in,” Sandground said. “So we had to use redemption cards for the packs obviously, because the real cards are too big. If you’re lucky, there’s a handful of redemption cards in these packs for Kevin Conroy cut signature cards in the product, so that’s probably the biggest chase in the whole product. If you’re just looking for what’s Mount Olympus, Mount Rushmore, crazy level chase, those Kevin Conray cut signatures are right at the top.”
More Autographs And Future Batman: The Animated Series Sets Are Possible
“The one signer we unfortunately did not manage to get to an agreement with in time for pack out was Mark Hamill as the Joker, who was obviously pretty iconic for his voice work in this series,” Sandground said. “You know, we spoke with his people, we just couldn’t get to terms by the time we had to kind of draw the line in the sand and say we need to get this product out, you know, we don’t want to delay it anymore. And we didn’t make a ton of this product.”
“Honestly, we are completely sold out of this product. I think the demand for this product is way larger than we thought it was going to be. I think it’s way larger than some of the online retailers thought it was going to be, because if you look at the price of boxes now, it’s significantly higher than when they were initially offered for sale at some of the major online retailers,” Sandground said. “You know, if you go back about a month ago, you could have bought these boxes of presale for about $120 a box. Today, they’re like around $250 a box.”
“That’s because we didn’t make a ton of it, and the demand is way bigger than the available supply. So, you know that certainly shows that the interest is there for this product, and that’s without having Mark Hamill sign. That’s not to say that we are not continuing discussions with Mark Hamill. We are, and hopefully we’ll find some opportunities in the future to come to terms and see what we can do with Mark Hamill,” Sandground said.
“It’s certainly something we’d be remiss to not look at, you know, given the demand we’re seeing here. Like I said, it did surprise us a bit. We know how beloved it is, but you never know until you put something out there how the market’s going to accept it, and we are seeing unbridled enthusiasm for it on this product. People are very excited and so sure, yes. Does that raise the question of whether there are additional products you can make for this IP? And you know, we’d be remiss not to consider that question, and we are considering that question at this point in time,” Sandground said.
“When I think about this product, I think we managed to provide a nice balance between a collector-based product where you can really enjoy it just for old school sheets and binders, building your set, trading around, building, working on stuff. I think we gave people that, and I also think we gave the modern collector who chases thrill-seeking and aspirational hits that go social and go viral on social media. I think we’ve got some of that as well, where I think it’s a nice balance of old school collecting and new school aspirational chase. I think we managed to kind of combine those two worlds pretty well,” Sandground said.
The Batman: The Animated Series Trading Card Set is available in stores and online stores now.
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